


The Purple Planet

by TheoMiller



Series: The Doctor Who Rewrite [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Doctor Who Rewrite, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crashing TARDIS lands on a planet that's been taken over by a sinister force.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Scene 1

The Doctor’s entire (new) body ached when she finally managed to land the TARDIS. She got up slowly, the too-big (once tightly fitting) tattered suit slipping down her limbs. The TARDIS was still making unhappy gear-grinding noises, but was stable.

She combed her fingers through her long hair and sighed. “Next stop, wardrobe,” she said.

The first thing she saw was Rose’s old jacket. She smiled and ran her fingers over it, but proceeded further into the room. “I think less brown this time,” she murmured, looking in the mirror. The pinstriped blazer was discarded in front of the mirror, and she slowly worked the buttons in the shirt loose as she walked through the narrow gaps between seemingly endless racks of clothing.

A pair of Martha’s black jeans smeared with dirt from the 17th century, the dress Donna wore to meet Agatha Christie, a white t-shirt of Ace’s probably covered in something explosive, a brightly coloured shirt of Peri’s…

There. A bright colour, but not so bright she looked positively mad (again). She grabbed a teal blazer with three-quarter sleeves, undug a white button down, and after a moment’s hesitance, black jeans.

When she walked out of the wardrobe room, she’d also donned a black bowtie, which she straightened self-consciously, and black boots.

After a minute of poking around, she found her sonic. It had changed, now green-tipped with warm coppery metal. “Perfect,” she said, and went to tuck it into the inside blazer pocket.

There was a clatter, and she looked down in puzzlement. The sonic had fallen to the floor. She picked it up, checked the inside of the blazer, and then groaned. “No pockets. Why are there no pockets?”

After several minutes of fruitless searching, she determined that neither the trousers nor the blazer had any pockets deep enough for her sonic. The back pocket of her jeans was barely deep enough for her psychic paper.

She scowled at the sonic. “You’re going to be difficult,” she said. “Where… Oh!” She tucked it behind her ear and smiled. “Geronimo,” the Doctor said quietly, and ventured out onto the planet outside, the cloud of smoke from the crash rolling out behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unnh-ba da-bum, unnh-ba da-bum, unnh-ba-da-da-bum, unnh-ba daa-unh da-danh-ba-da-da-dum ooo-weee-ooooooooo eee-yoo-ooooooooo
> 
> Brought to you by heroscafe, and now for a commercial break where I point you towards blogs and such that I'm fond of - first and foremost is, of course, stfu-moffat.tumblr.com - they're lovely, really, take a look-see.


	2. Scene 2

The Doctor wandered through the forest. It was hung with snow and ice that ranged from lavender to almost plum in some areas. “Brill—” she frowned. “Doesn’t sound right anymore, does it? Snow. _Purple snow_. It’s cool. Very cool – cold, actually. _Cool_.”

“Identify yourself!” A sharp voice ordered. She sighed and turned around, slowly raising her hands above her head. “I said, identify yourself.”

The man – who was humanoid, if not human, with purple skin – was pointing a rather large gun at her.

“I’m the Doctor,” she said. “Bit different, now, different things going on, no pockets, which is annoying. But still the Doctor. Who are you?”

“6013,” he said. “What is your business here?”

She lowered her arms slowly, but he didn’t seem too concerned now, instead looking confused.

“Sorry, did you say your name is 6013? Are all your names numerically based?”

He shifted the weapon up a bit. “I’m asking the questions here. Why are you here?”

“My ship crashed. It’s being repaired as we speak, probably redecorating too, but I thought I’d just mosey about here while I waited. Am I disturbing anything?”

“Our scanners didn’t detect any ships entering the atmosphere,” 6013 said.

“She’s sort of funny like that,” said the Doctor. “Listen, I’m clearly not armed, could you maybe just… lower your weapon?”

“What’s that behind your ear?”

“Screwdriver. Sonic screwdriver, actually.”

6013 frowned and lifted a faintly glowing small purple oblong to his mouth. “I have found a humanoid with advanced technology whom identifies as a doctor. Should we call the Centurion?”

“Bring him back here. I want to see for myself,” said a voice, emitting from the oblong.

“Her,” said 6013. “Humanoid, but with feminine features.”

There was a pause. “The Centurion said he might not look the same…” The voice sounded unsure now.

“Hello!” the Doctor called. “Why are you looking for me?”

“Bring her,” said the voice, and the glowing faded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up on our "cool blog adverts" is dibellanyx.tumblr.com - she's a mutual of mine, lovely superwholock things, great person all around.


	3. Scene 3

The Doctor narrowed her eyes. “Listen, you don’t want to get mixed up with anyone who wants to find me. Bad things happen to people who look for me.”

“Is that a threat?” 6013 asked, even as he lowered the gun.

“No,” said the Doctor. “No, of course not. If you know anything, _anything_ , about me, you know I mean you no harm.”

He stared at her for a moment. Then, “You’re playing mind games,” he said. “Walk in front of me. Don’t make any sudden movements.”

The Doctor complied, but continued speaking over her shoulder, “You can do the talking, if you want. Tell me about the Centurion. About this planet. Why it’s purple. Why your name is a number.”

“Shouldn’t you know all of that already?”

“I know we’re in the Murex galaxy, around the… forty-third century? My brain cells are still cooking. The purple is probably ostrananium, right? In your water and your soil and your blood, no doubt. So this must be Conchyliata.”

“It is you,” said 6013. “You’re the Doctor. The God of Time.”

She cringed. “Don’t do that. I’m not a god.”

“The Daleks. The Sycorax. The Sontarans. The Cybermen. Great warrior races, all of them fleeing from the very mention of your name.”

“I wasn’t alone,” the Doctor said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear slowly. “I had help. I always had help.” When she lowered her hand – still moving in careful, steady movements to assuage his fears – she had her sonic in her hand, careful to keep it shielded from view by the rest of her body.

“Where is your help now?” 6013 asked.

“Gone,” she said, and spun around. She grabbed the gun away from him, tossed it over her shoulder, and pressed the sonic against the purple oblong. It exploded with a spectacular array of sparks, and he dropped it, cursing.

“You probably shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “They’ll be here soon.”

She started off towards the TARDIS. “I’ll be gone sooner.”

6013 grabbed her arm. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They’ll do anything to find you. They’ll pry an image of you from my brain, and then the Centurion will find you by any means necessary. It’s so much easier if you just come along.”

The Doctor glanced over at the gun. “Memory extraction like that can kill you,” she said slowly.

“There are thousands of us. I am expendable.”

“By thousands,” said the Doctor, “do you mean ‘over six thousand thirteen’?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. “It’s not a name. It’s a UPC. A VIN number for people.”

“The Centurion said you’d cooperate to save any one of us,” said 6013.

The Doctor’s eyes flew open and a small, dangerous smile appeared on her face. “I don’t have to cooperate to save you,” she said, and grabbed his wrist before dashing off, dragging him along behind her.

“This is madness!” He yelled, digging his heels into the snow, rather ineffectually. “They’re everywhere, they _will_ find us before you reach your ship.”

“It’s only a mile,” said the Doctor.

“A mile?!”

She scowled at him, even as she pulled him up a snowbank and further into the woods. “It’d go faster if you stopped fighting me. Come on, you’ve obviously heard about me. _Believe_ in me, 6013.”

He stumbled, and they fell into the purple snow with a _humph_ as the Doctor landed in cold, powdery, _lavender_ snow. “Don’t call me that,” he said quietly.

The Doctor beamed. “What shall I call you?” She asked. “Do you remember your name?”

“I never had one.”

“How about Vin? Vincent, Vin for short.”

Vincent nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay?” She said.

“Yeah.”

“Then… GERONIMO!” She shouted, and pulled him to his feet. They ran through the icy paths left from the Doctor’s footprints going in the opposite direction, occasionally slipping, but the Doctor kept pulling him back up onto safer, crunchy snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next I simply have to recommend the villainsbar.tumblr.com


	4. scene 4

They’d made it maybe a half of the way there before they heard it. “Hunting dogs,” Vin panted, leaning against a tree. “They’d have tracked the comm unit and are following our trail.”

“You barely need dogs when the ground is covered in snow,” admitted the Doctor. “It’s okay. We’re halfway there. Okay? We’ll make it.”

“Liar,” said Vin, on a wheeze.

The Doctor sighed and looked up at the purple sky. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so— _oho_!”

Vin looked at her, confused, and she grinned. “How are you at climbing?” she said, and tapped the bark of the tree he was leaning on.

“You’re mad,” he told her, even as he grabbed a branch and swung himself up onto it. “They’ll look up eventually.”

“And we’ll be several trees away,” she replied, and climbed up behind him.

Vin clung rather tightly to the trunk of the tree. “How do you intend to get us to the next tree, Doctor?”

“See where that branch overlaps one of another tree? Come on, we have five minutes, you can do this, crawl over there.”

While he carefully made his way down the branch, the Doctor jumped to the other tree’s nearest limb and grabbed the trunk to keep herself from falling. “There’s a tree with thick foliage over there,” she said, nodding to it. “Head that way. If you’re caught out in the open, stay still, don’t panic, don’t make a sound, don’t try to make it to the next tree.”

She moved again, and glanced back to check on Vin when she was steady. He was picking up speed, moving more confidently, and she beamed.

They were both one tree away when the barking of dogs came to a roaring crescendo of excited yipping at the tree where they’d begun. Vin shifted just a bit, just enough to shield himself from the search party with the trunk of the tree, and in doing so the tread of his left boot came down on a patch of ice that had not yet been melted down by the watery sunlight, and he lost balance.

The Doctor watched, horrified, as he tumbled backwards, hitting his head on a branch and crashing to the ground below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, whoops. In keeping with that, actualucifer.tumblr.com is this great personal blog of an Aussie lady, with occasional answering of asks in persona of Lucifer.


	5. scene 5

The pile of snow on the ground beneath and his thickly padded jacket might have protected him from the worst of the impact, but the plum snow was melting into a maroon puddle beneath his head, and at least twenty similarly uniformed people with large, eyeless hounds were dashing over with the same sort of gun Vin had been carrying.

One of them toed him, and his eyes fluttered but didn’t open. “Looks like it wasn’t the Doctor,” one said.

“Could be,” another argued.

The first one scoffed. “You really think the Doctor would hit him over the head and leave? And look, there aren’t even footprints.”

“I bet it was some sort of shape-shifting thing,” a third said.

“Let’s get back to base,” said a gruff fourth.

The Doctor remained stock still, half shock and half the preservation instinct that had gotten her this far, until the last uniformed man left. Vin was still lying there in a pool of half-melted snow and steadily coagulating blood. She dropped to the ground. “Vin,” said the Doctor, “oh, please wake up.”

His breathing was shallow, and she knelt beside him to check his pulse. It was sluggish, like his body knew every beat of his heart was killing him. She picked him up, one arm around his shoulders and the other under his knees. She staggered to her feet and slowly trudged towards the TARDIS. “There’s a place,” she said quietly, “—it’s on Earth—where, at dawn, the light catches the wheat and makes it look almost orange. And after a frost, the leaves on the trees at the edge of the field glint just enough,” she almost stumbled and shifted him in her arms, and his head lolled, “that it looks a little bit like where I grew up. Sometimes, between… between my friends, I go there, and I sit, and it reminds me. It reminds me that there are places and people worth fighting for.”

The TARDIS was almost in sight.

“Oh, I would’ve shown you so many places worth fighting for. Ones I’ve fought for and ones I’ve never heard of.”

His chest was still. There was a bloodstain on her blazer’s sleeve. The Doctor looked down at the body in her arms, then at the doors of the TARDIS, and then freed one hand just enough to snap her fingers. The door opened with a cloud of steam, and she steps into the new metallic interior. “She’s redecorated,” said the Doctor to Vin. “She does that.” Screens whirred to life, and the Doctor snapped her fingers again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thelibrarina.tumblr.com isn't a whovian, but she reblogs marvel, good omens, vikings, and plays. She's hilarious, you should see her iambic pentameter sexting.


	6. scene 6

The Doctor picked up her shovel and walked back to the TARDIS, the faint sheen of sweat on her forehead glinting in the first rays of the morning sun as she made her way down the hill and into the wheat. “You’re leaving a crop circle. Well, crop square. It’s rude.”

In response, the TARDIS doors opened, and the Doctor wiped the last of the dirt off her hands, set down the shovel, and began the dematerialisation sequences.

Up on the hill, the headstone reflected morning sunlight down on the freshly churned dirt in front of it.

The TARDIS faded.


End file.
